Ms Patricia Callan:

We have a huge number of self-employed and individual members who will never take anyone on because they are so scared of employment law. There are 40 pieces of employment law one needs to know overnight if one chooses to hire one person. This militates against people, in the very early days, hiring someone. Our survey showed that most companies have about 52 employees before they hire a human relations professional to deal with this myriad of issues. Until then, it is a case of the owner-manager trying to grapple with it.